the bblog

dyson

I've been playing a lot of Dyson, (forum thread) which is an interesting little indie game where you play as a strain of Dyson Tree competing with several other (AI controlled) strains. Each tree on a asteroid (up to six) produce seeds, which act both as combat and colonization units. It's interesting!

Borders between territories are so fluid as to be a entirely irrelevant concept, since there's no cost for moving a fleet of seeds through enemy territory; and it's impossible to tell where an enemy force is attacking. In fact, it's fairly common for a fleet to just be passing through to attack someone else, so it's a manifest waste of effort to scramble defenders.

For example, Green's moving about two hundred seeds around the interior arc as we speak. (Double metaphorically, since I paused it to type this.) They're obviously going to attack me, since there's nobody else in that sector, but where, exactly? I won't know until they hit. And guessing carries a strong penalty, since you can't belay a fleet in flight; so if you guess wrong you'll probably lose an asteroid.

Above and beyond this is asteroid composition which affects the speed and toughness of seeds made by the trees inhabiting that particular rock.

The asteroid composition mechanic is interesting, and I don't think anything quite like it has been done; but as it stands there are quite a few flaws. First of all, you can't tell what kind of a rock it is without first clicking on it, and you can't even do that without first exploring it, which effectively means sending a fleet to it.

The result is that there's no way to tell at a glance how desirable a rock is. And since there's no tooltips, there no way to tell how valuable a rock is period, unless you happened to have memorized the relevant part of the tutorial.

This fades into insignifigance when you realize that this mechanic really doesn't matter at all. In the startgame, you have no choice as to which rock to capture, so different strains of seed, which would be damn useful at this point, never come into play. And by the endgame, you're marshaling thundering hordes of seeds, drawn from dozens of different rocks, and so is your opponent. No matter how unique each strain is, they average out once you've got three hundred seeds.

But the basic gameplay is compelling, and it'll be interesting to see what Dyson evolves into.